ABSTRACT
This chapter accounts for both the historical roots of amateur porn production across different media and the complexities involved in the contemporary distribution of user-generated content. The Latin root of the word amare, 'to love', suggests that amateurs do what they do for the love of the practice rather than for the objective of monetary or other gain. Amateur photography and film have, since their nineteenth-century beginnings, been focused on the private sphere of home, leisure, family and intimate others, and amateur porn is no exception to the rule. The standard narrative of amateur pornography usually travels from still photography and 8 mm home movies, through Polaroid and video, to the qualitative and quantitative rupture caused by digital media technologies and online distribution platforms. Unlike the ephemerality of amateur porn across the previous decades, materials once uploaded online have considerable tenacity. Digital files are often associated with immateriality, but this is hardly accurate.
